茶의 保管法考察

Studies on Storage of Tea

Storage of tea is vital factor as well as making tea. If well-madetea is mistakenly preserved, it will change in quality and peoplecannot drink it. The most important reason to drink tea is to be healthy; however, if you do not properly preserve tea, it will cause sickness. Therefore, it is imperative to appropriately preserve tea according to its ingredients. Since the past, the importance of storage has been 1,300 years ago, Yugu emphasized it through his book, Dagyeong. Otherbooks about tea such as Darok of Chaeyang, Darok of Jangwon, and Daso of Heo Cha Seo say that you should be more careful with storage of tea than making tea. Nowadays, tea containers have been developed. On the other hand, people enjoy tea while they even do not understand the importance of storage. One of the reasons is that people enjoy not taste of tea but tea time only. If you do not keep tea properly, it will lose its good ingredients for health, taste, flavor, and color. The most essential element in preserving tea is to maintain its distinctive taste and ingredients. People dry tea leaf to keep it for long, so that a microorganism hardly deteriorates a quality of tea. However, tea is highly hygroscopic; accordingly, it can easily go bad. In addition, in summer time, since the quality of tea changes more rapidly due to high temperature and humidity, you should take into account its primary factor. Recently, fast foods have been developed and storage period has been liberalized. Therefore, the importance of storage is being gradually stressed. The purpose of studying food storage scientifically and practically is to preserve its distinctive taste and ingredients. In this thesis, I attempt to search for factors to cause quality change of tea, and find solutions to extend storage period. Thus, I present the method to keep distinctive flavor, and color of tea and water by restraining an activity of microorganism and minimizing oxidization of chlorophyll, catechin.